Jerusalem meets Silicon Valley in $300M project

Ten years ago, the Albert L. Schultz JCC in Palo Alto first met with Steinberg Architects to discuss ways to grow in its leased location.

Those initial plans are laughably modest as the Taube Koret Campus for Jewish Life, a joint venture by the renamed Oshman Family Jewish Community Center, the Jewish Home of San Francisco and the Jewish Community Federation, prepares to open a $300 million, 8.5-acre, intergenerational mixed-use development on the site of Sun Microsystems old campus. It opens Oct. 17.

The adjacent lots are also being turned into housing. Regis Homes is building Altaire, 103 market-rate townhomes. Sixty-one of them are complete, and 22 have been sold. Bridge Housing is constructing its own 56 affordable rental units for seniors, called Alta Torre, which will open in January 2010.

In all, transforming the full 12 acres will cost over $500 million.

The Taube Koret Campus for Jewish Life, the main complex, is built around what developers see as a town square. Steinberg Architects describes their plan as a 21st century reinterpretation of the ancient city of Jerusalem, by way of Silicon Valley. It includes the 145,000-square-foot Oshman Family Jewish Community Center with a Club One fitness center, the Moldaw Family Residences with 193 units of senior housing, a 300-seat theater, nursery school, teen center, shop and café, and Stanford Hospital resource center.

And rather than have one side of the 8.5 acres be the JCC and the other senior housing, the two are interwoven throughout.

“Our goal was to create an inter-generational campus where the people who live here do not feel like they are isolated,” said Alan Sotoloff, executive director of the Oshman Family JCC. He expects that 5,000 people will come to the campus each day.

Jeff Birdwell, president of Sares Regis Group’s commercial division, which managed the project, called this among the most “wildly complex” projects he’s worked on.

“Any time you work on a vertical mixed-use project, any number of complexities comes into play,” Birdwell said. “Linking all of the pieces together becomes quite a jigsaw puzzle.”

The project took two years to build, and it will be on budget.

On its busiest day, 425 workers toiled on the site. In all, some 800 workers played a role in construction, which alone rings in around $190 million. Other costs, including buying the land and paying architect and developer fees, will total about $110 million.

Roughly $140 million was raised through private sources, $10 million of which will go toward an endowment.

The campus, when complete, will employ about 300 people.

Sares Regis has bid to take the inter-generational campus idea up the Peninsula from Palo Alto to Foster City, where the firm is in the process of designing a new city center around an existing JCC, senior center and public library.